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Is the Sky Really Falling? A Review of Recent Global Warming Scare Stories

In the last two years, a remarkable amount of disturbing news
has been published concerning global warming, largely concentrating
on melting of polar ice, tropical storms and hurricanes, and mass
extinctions. The sheer volume of these stories appears to be moving
the American political process toward some type of policy
restricting emissions of carbon dioxide.

It is highly improbable, in a statistical sense, that new
information added to any existing forecast is almost always “bad”
or “good”; rather, each new finding has an equal probability of
making a forecast worse or better. Consequently, the preponderance
of bad news almost certainly means that something is missing, both
in the process of science itself and in the reporting of science.
This paper examines in detail both recent scientific reports on
climate change and the communication of those reports.

Needless to say, the unreported information is usually counter
to the bad news. Reports of rapid disintegration of Greenland’s ice
ignore the fact that the region was warmer than it is now for
several decades in the early 20th century, before humans could have
had much influence on climate. Similar stories concerning
Antarctica neglect the fact that the net temperature trend in
recent decades is negative, or that warming the surrounding ocean
can serve only to enhance snowfall, resulting in a gain in ice.
Global warming affects hurricanes in both positive and negative
fashions, and there is no relationship between the severity of
storms and ocean-surface temperature, once a commonly exceeded
threshold temperature is reached. Reports of massive species
extinction also turn out to be impressively flawed.

This constellation of half-truths and misstatements is a
predictable consequence of the way that science is now conducted,
where issues compete with each other for public support.
Unfortunately, this creates a culture of negativity that is
reflected in the recent spate of global warming reports.

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Patrick J. Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at
the Cato Institute and professor of natural resources at Virginia
Polytechnic Institute and State University. He is a past president
of the American Association of State Climatologists and an author
of the 2003 climate science “Paper of the Year” selected by the
Association of American Geographers. His research has been
published in major scientific journals, including Climate
Research, Climatic Change, Geophysical Research Letters, Journal of
Climate, Nature, and Science. He received his Ph.D. in
ecological climatology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison
in 1979. His most recent book is Meltdown: The Predictable
Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the
Media.